Patients are forced to have a future appointment

[itsme-zeix]

In real world clinics, patient data is often kept for various tracking purposes (such as to check history of a formerly-discharged patient). In this application, patients are disallowed from having no appointments.

It is also often the case that appointment dates are given to patients at a later date depending on the specialist's availability. In such cases, the patient's contact data cannot be stored in ClinicBuddy to be later contacted and informed.

[nus-se-bot]

Team's Response

Thanks for the issue, however, patients are allowed to have no appointments, since it is stated to be optional.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.Rejected]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: Thank you for reviewing the issue and pointing out my oversight.

I appreciate the clarification regarding the add command allowing patients to have no appointments initially; this was indeed an oversight on my part. However, this issue still exists while using the update command. Having now identified that this issue only affects the update command and not the add command, I agree that this issue only poses some minor inconvenience to users who must use a workaround - as such, I fully agree with the drop in severity from medium to low, but I would like to respectfully disagree on the rejection of the issue.

Regarding the update command

• As stated the UG, the apt/ flag in the update command is marked as optional, which implies that it can be used to update a patient's appointment such as to remove an appointment:

• However, I was unable to achieve this during my testing. For example, leaving the field blank after /apt did not work:

This behaviour poses a practical concern in real-world clinics, where patients might cancel appointments or request to postpone them to a future, undecided date (due to specialists' limited availability). In such cases, clinic staff must be able to update the patient’s record to reflect that they currently have no scheduled appointment while still keeping their contact information intact for follow-ups.

Without the ability to directly remove the appointment, the staff have to resort to workarounds, such as removing and re-adding a patient entirely, just to ensure patient information is retained while waiting to schedule a new appointment. his introduces unnecessary inefficiencies to workflows.

If the update command indeed allows for the removal of appointments to be empty (and I overlooked it), I agree that this issue can be rejected. However, if it does not, I believe addressing this gap would enhance the application’s utility and align it better with the needs of real-world clinics.

Thank you for considering this clarification!

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## :question: Issue severity Team chose [`severity.Low`] Originally [`severity.Medium`] - [ ] I disagree **Reason for disagreement:** [replace this with your explanation]

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